Political Cortex: Campaign 2008: CNN's New "Hillary Voter Defection Poll" Looks Like More Media Snake Oil

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Campaign 2008: CNN's New "Hillary Voter Defection Poll" Looks Like More Media Snake Oil

By Bill Hare
08/25/2008 01:26:15 PM EST

On Sunday, the eve of the Democratic National Convention, CNN was abuzz about a new poll revealing that Hillary Clinton primary voters, who had been recorded previously at a 16 % figure favoring John McCain, had suddenly ballooned to 27%. The development was deemed more politically harmful to Obama since it was taken following his selection of Joseph Biden.

According to these same polling "experts" Hillary's voters represent middle class values of working families with many being hard working feminists. Are these the prototypical voters of someone seeking to extend the Bush-Cheney legacy?

This alleged trend to McCain is even more absurd in the wake of disclosures that McCain needs his staff to help him on how many homes he owns and reports of his wife's wealthy status along with the fact that the opportunistic Arizonan left his older wife as she lay recovering from a serious auto accident to marry younger blonde Cindy the beer heiress.

Does the media's own analysis of Hillary Clinton primary voters, strong Democratic Party activists, feminists and blue collar union workers, comport with jumping ship to support McCain since Obama, whose Senate voting record stacks up remarkably close to Clinton's, is deemed so repellent to them?

The reason that one CNN analyst kept spouting as he feverishly reconstructed the national map showing how Pennsylvania and Ohio could now swing over to McCain with the benefit of newly acquired Hillary Clinton voters was that Obama and his high command had shown "disrespect" for the New York senator.

Since the poll was taken reportedly after the Biden selection the question must be asked: Did Obama and his supporters deliver a sudden whopping dish of disrespect for Clinton on or about the time of the Biden selection? Remember that an earlier poll had the purported defection figure at 16% so what caused this sudden surge? This was something that CNN's "experts" skirted around.

Anyone who has worked with Democratic activists in campaigns now how the venting process works. During the brief period after your candidate loses staunchly committed Democrats might well and sometimes do say anything, such as detesting the other candidate so much that they are ready to defect.

Generally with as little as the passing of one week emotions cool, reason prevails, and it is time to soldier one.

One very nice lady, a schoolteacher and mother to one of my college classmates, assured me that a particular Democratic U.S. Senate candidate should be bypassed for his Republican opponent since he was so unacceptable to grassroots Democrats and was part of a large machine determined to impose rigid control.

Two weeks after this discussion I read a story in a local paper about a coffee meeting introducing this same Democrat to female activists of the area.

The adamant lady to whom I had spoken was listed as one of the event's hosts. In short, her venting had passed and it was on to the election and standing with a candidate whose views far more readily comported with hers than his opponent.

With so much time having passed between the Democratic presidential primary and the present, any logical analysis would find a shrinking of stated support for McCain out of anti-Obama bitterness, with a poll taken virtually on the even of the party's convention looming as particularly suspicious.

The current poll reminds me of the 2004 pre-election caper of Sean Hannity and his Fox News bosses. Remember that poll showing that a large number of African Americans intended to support Bush due to evangelical Christian beliefs?

This action so eagerly anticipated by the Rupert Murdoch minions failed to materialize as African Americans continued to resist Bush and Cheney as firmly and numerically as always. I predict that the current poll regarding Hillary Clinton primary voters will fall into the same dust bin of unsubstantiated information.